Paul Cezanne’s Metaphysical Paintings in 3 Works: A Failed Synthesis?

Paul Cézanne’s late works attempted to relay nature, as well as his own impressions of it, with minimal artifice. He eschewed the weighty influence of artistic tradition—especially the rules of linear perspective—and increasingly relied upon the pure tones of individual brushstrokes to construct an overall panorama suffused with a delicacy of light that made his art unique. Subjected to misunderstandings on the part of supporters and critics alike, his late work shows a new kind of visuality that profoundly influenced the later avant-garde artists.

The artistic reputation of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) ran the gamut of evaluations throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. Toward the end of his life, in 1903, a certain Rochefort published his scathing Love for the Ugly in response to Cézanne’s mature work. This prompted the citizens of his hometown of Aix-en-Provence to send the beleaguered artist messages demanding that he leave the city that he was dishonoring. The dismissive or outright hostile attitude to his art plagued Cézanne for most of his career. Much earlier, the august and innovative figure of Manet had said that his fellow artist was a mere “mason who paints with a trowel.”

Gradually and very late in his life, Cézanne slowly gained popularity, with his first solo exhibitions and certain allies both defending him and seeking to understand his obsessive project. Posthumously, he was lionized by artists who are securely in the elevated canon of the early Modernist art of the French avant-garde and beyond. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were effusive, agreeing that Cézanne was “the father of us all,” meaning that formal innovations derived from new ways of seeing in the early 20th century (Fauvism, Cubism, and abstraction generally) had as their fount of influence the pictorial innovations of the man neglected and derided in his own time.

In this, there is the almost complete effacement of artistic expression for the sake of the receptivity of natural impressions as a desired end. Far from the abstraction from nature that Kandinsky saw in his work, Cézanne set his art on the impossible task of relating the pure essence of nature and the sensations he derived from it.

It was an impossible task because of the shortcomings of the medium of painting and the limits of representation, as well as the impossibility of erasing the artistic subjectivity that is bound up with the motive and the act of representation itself. For all that, in the close relation of Cézanne’s marks on the canvas and his sensations accrued from the external world, his art is unique and revolutionary.

Cézanne’s art is generally designated as Post-Impressionist. But some, like art historian Richard Shiff, argue for Cézanne’s thoroughgoing Impressionism. Iconic Impressionists like Claude Monet, however, proceeded from an overall conception of an atmosphere and objects that informed their aesthetic. Cézanne, by contrast, developed his pictures in reverse—proceeding from the particularity of a single brushstroke to the universal.

The fact is that for its time, Cézanne’s unique mode of vision and representational methods resist easy categorization into one school or another. The man who so influenced the trajectory of early 20th-century art had for his influence, above all, his personal experience of nature. During the artist’s maturity, perhaps in the 1880s, he remarked to his friend Joachim Gasquet in a letter that “[t]he colourful place where the soul of the surfaces trembles, the prismatic warmth, the encounter of the surfaces in the sunlight… The areas have to flow into one another […] It’s all about the volume.” In this brief account, Cézanne cites nature as his sole teacher while referring to an artistic means to represent its essence.

It is a matter of conjecture as to whether his late work evinces an evolution of style. However, because he was so concerned with the bond between the environment and the stimuli it emitted to his perception, such questions as those of style seem inapplicable. Instead, what seems more appropriate is a theory of “adaptation.” The three late works discussed below will be used to support the view that they are the respective result of individual responses to a manifold of perceptions of a given setting. Within the processes of perception comes Cézanne’s conscious effort: the “translation” of the impression into a portrayal or a conceptual manifold that is embodied in the image.

The process is one of building up the image from the prime unit of a single patch of color that is both replicated and variegated internally in the act of painting. It is tempting, given the often-thick application of paint to align the process with that of additive sculpture in which visuality and physicality merge to engage the holistic quality of perception. In these late paintings, it is difficult to chart the straight and comprehensive line of an evolving aesthetic because the subject matter’s thematics involve the flux and incommensurability of the impressions of a given setting.

Cézanne’s often-quoted conviction that the forms of nature as perceived can be reduced to the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone seems to be borne out in this painting. As is evident in his work, these forms are not seen by him as abstractions from nature but as a means of approaching it more intimately. In the geometry of this picture, the sphere is seen in the shape of the apples, a pear combines the sphere and the cone, while the extended leg of the cupid is a cylinder that culminates in a cone at the extremity.

The movement of the cupid is a result of its frozen pose and the result of Cézanne’s treatment of color and form. In his colors—the highlighted white of the cupid’s brow, chin, and hair (which also contains green)—there is a shifting effect and a swing from cool to warm. To emphasize that this studio prop is a dead object, the lineaments of the face are neutralized in a vagueness. Rudimentary marks are made depicting the traces of the mouth, eyes, and nose. They are identifiable as these features but are achieved with an economy of paint and, because of this, are distorted. We are more aware of the brushstrokes than their referents as facial features.

The nose is flat, and this effacement is affected with a recessive silver-blue tone. It is clear that the intention is to relate an abridged or distilled form with the careful application of color. In a local moment, the remnant of the shoulder of the missing arm that would be reaching toward the picture plane, in fact, does in an interaction of red and green. The missing form of the arms, or at least a residual movement, is rearticulated by color alone. Perhaps the missing arms led to the choice to include the figure; its conventional formal integrity is broken down. Insofar as form is associated with line, as it had been traditionally, Cézanne represents the cupid’s form using both line and color tones. It is the place in the picture that most provides a site for the interaction of a disintegrating linearity and tone, as well as of the tones themselves.

However, the plaster cupid is just that: a representational object. In painting it, Cézanne is making a representation of a representation. His representation of it is not a nature morte (still life or dead nature) but rather a facture morte (dead fabric). He is crafting an image of a crafted thing at a double remove from nature. It is maybe too much to say that the artist is giving figuration to the Platonic allegory of the cave, which teaches the acquisition of true knowledge in the glare of sunlit nature, while ignorance is the lot of the interior cave-dweller. Yet, Cézanne is surely aware, in view of his obsessive engagement with nature, of this removal from it in the form of the cupid. This object is not revived by the artist, as the face is given cursory attention, but it is almost a canvas within the painting for the operations of tonal movement.

The prominent curtain denotes theatricality and, thereby, artifice—not just the assemblage of objects gathered for painting but the nature of the medium of painting. As Cézanne maintained, art can only be a “harmony parallel to nature.” The curtain unfurls and spreads on the table to reveal a dramatization of appearances in light, which are dependent for their readability on a construction based on minute brushstroke.

The left background of the painting is vague, perhaps a window or doorway onto the outside world. A horizon line is detectible, as are potential cloud formations in the angular strokes above it. Despite its occupation of a small space in the image, the nebulous painting of the landscape, in conjunction with its nuanced tonalities within a broad spectrum from yellow-white above to deep green, suggests the commotion of a squall or wind. This is a living drama that is in counterpoint to the staged and artificial one within the room. This diminutive section of nature forms the authentic fount of experience that Cézanne so obsessively sought to capture.

In this context, the curtain doesn’t merely reveal the artist’s self-conscious still life arrangement, but it acts as a barrier between human agency and the sublime, imprescriptible, and unpresentable power of nature. All Cézanne can do, as he is aware, is describe it in a limited fashion. Yet the curtain sitting heavily on the table, like a prohibition of the means of art from presenting nature, is also painted as an intermediary between the two realms in terms of its placement and colors. It is flecked in the pale gold light of the exterior and imparts to the room natural greens. Nature is provoking by means of its light—sensations. Hence the artistic choice of painting its impetus and residue in purposefully loose gestures.

The seeming gap between the natural and the artificial, the exterior and interior, is further complicated by a chiasmus or an interpenetration. The natural fruit is, after all, inside, and the curtain is lit with the brilliance and subtlety of natural light. The fruit itself seems to radiate out beyond the confines of its shapes, which are hardly outlined. This studied imprecision leans on the evocative power of tone, whereas in the figure of the cupid, tone, and line are more collaborative.

The picture also gives evidence of what Norman Turner has called subjective curvature, for instance, in the bowed line of the right-hand edge of the table. Turner notes that, from Johannes Kepler to Leonardo da Vinci, there were those who queried the comprehensiveness and realism of linear perspective and observed experiential visual anomalies that problematized it. The bend in Cézanne’s table seems to illustrate the observation of the early 17th-century German astronomer Wilhelm Schickhardt that straight lines that do not cross through the axis of the eye will appear curved, as Turner has noted. In this light, what might appear an expressive departure from verisimilitude in late Cézanne is actually a stripping away of the conventions of representation in place for centuries for the sake of a more direct perception.

Jonathan Crary has written that 19th-century developments in visual technology contributed to a new shared cultural visuality that superseded a visuality dominated by traditional linear perspective.  In particular, Crary uses the example of the stereoscope, which, he argues, brought about a visual field of disjunct elements. This field is held in opposition to the homogeneous space of conventional linear perspective.

As true as this is of Cézanne’s Still Life with a Plaster Cupid of the 1890s, it is untrue of his later works. His methods generally cannot be reduced to conventional or unconventional formulae, as in his late works from the turn of the century, there is a concern with rendering pure impressions provoked by a given moment. The brushwork is systematic as Cézanne builds from the particular stroke to the general harmony, but in this, he does not follow a general abstract rule for picture-making which a theoretical formula would entail.

In both Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1904) and Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir, which was completed about a year later, there is indeed homogeneity and an overriding sense of unity. The relevant homogeneity of the 1904 painting is, however, not applicable in the sense of the organization of space and objects therein but a sort of communion, brought about by tonal means, of the perceiving and representing of consciousness on the one hand and the contents of the stimuli of the external world. These contents are necessarily conveyed using the single brushstroke as a building block and are related in tandem by receding planes of cool foreground colors through the warm yellows, browns, and pinks of the middle distance. These middle-ground tones are also projected onto the mountain as if the visual process that observes each successive field carries with it the remnants of the last. In this way, the picture, through the lasting artifact that it is, communicates not just perceptual experiences but their encoding in the memory.

Cézanne wrote of a central concern: “the effect of distance; the colors must reveal every interval in depth.” The word interval suggests the intention of successive stages of depth moving from, in this picture, the inchoate painting of the lower foreground vegetation through the brilliant but fluctuating play of light on the houses and buildings of the middle ground toward the complex of tones of the mountain. But even in the interstices of these broad—and admittedly too conventionally defined—phases, there are both striking contrasts of warm and cool that oscillate in a shimmer. Sometimes this happens as locally as on the wall of a single diminutive house.

The primacy of the stroke or the daub is evident and, in being itself caused to interact with other strokes that are either overlain or juxtaposed, they are integrated into the harmony of a compound and sublime impression. In the painting process, the stroke seems to have a microcosmic impetus—the point where the impression and the representation meet.

The mountain itself is strongly lit and painstakingly contoured, its mass and scale perhaps speaking to the eternal certitude that Cézanne so craved in his art. But in the nuances of its tones under the heavy sky whose clouds shroud it in parts are the vicissitudes of phenomena and of perception. In the distance, there is a visual specificity, the impression is sufficiently distant from the stimulus for the understanding to give it a tentative form that is unbounded from the rule of line.

The eponymous black castle of the left middle ground dimly gleams in modulations of brown and deep gold, catching the last rays of sunlight. All else is in flux. The sharp delineation of the castle contrasts with the irregular folds of the natural rock formations of the mountain and is dwarfed by its scale. In both, though, there is the characteristic subtlety of color tones. The greens and blues that are smeared on the castle signal the impression of the landscape on it and of nature on a human edifice. The broken line of the mountain is swarmed not just with clouds but with a pulsing ambient nature that gives the flat surface of the canvas the impression of a panorama.

Lighter tones on the various peaks of the mountain interplay with the darker fissures to create shifting movement and a transient appearance in the fading light. In these moments, where vision begins to demand the alliance of intuition to perceive, Cézanne’s tones, which bleed into each other, sacrifice the accuracy of optical vision for a broader perception.

We see the entire picture by means of a series of receding fields of tone, as in Montagne Sainte-Victoire, but this time they are gradated within a narrower range—except for the castle, which is conspicuous in its stark colors, resisting the onset of twilight. These fields begin with the encirclement of foliage in the upper right and bottom left in a device that would traditionally be called repoussoir (pushing back), and which Cézanne turns on its head. Instead of the traditional and precisely placed copse of trees in the foreground, there is a mere oscillating suggestion of leaves, branches, and vegetation. This trembling also consists of the play of the canopy against the deep blue blotches of the sky, to the point where they meld and are mutually indistinguishable.

Strictly speaking, as with so much of later Cézanne, descriptive words for compositional place, such as foreground or background, are made redundant by his range, nuance, and pulsation of tonalities, as well as varying degrees of clarity. The mountain advances towards us, the foreground recedes, and the image is compressed.

This compression is accentuated by the limited scope from the viewing position. Despite his use of a broad range of tones, Cézanne blends the landmarks to form and relate a totalizing impression of an evanescent movement of light and intuition. The foreground curtain of vegetation and canopy—unlike in the Still Life with a Plaster Cupid in which it signified artifice—acts almost like an opening eye whose vision is enmeshed in the external objects of sight. Crary has observed in the work “a single field of vision in which inside and outside are confounded.”

Cézanne remarked to his friend, the artist and theorist Emile Bernard in 1904, that we see nature “as if through a veil,” and in Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir we could read the curtain of the canopy as that veil being drawn back for a more direct engagement with nature.

At the same time, this painting—its purposefully loosely defined and nebulous fields—merge and point toward a dissolution of the organizational power of vision which implies a distance from the objects of the world. At first, the picture fills the perception with many impressions, but these become incorporated by the overall atmosphere of carefully gradated colors. The atmosphere, especially in the impasto passages of the sky, is granted a tangible objecthood.

The artist overtly stated the need for blues to make the air more palpable earlier in his career. Perhaps even, for Cézanne, the object is also the subject that transmits its stimuli to the senses, as can be seen by the density of the atmosphere in this painting, as well as in other works like his Lac d’Annecy. It becomes the site of the resolution of the various impressions in a unifying synthesis. Not only is synthesis evident in this way, but through the process of painting, Cézanne combines his original perceptual experience with the techniques of representation to invite the viewer’s indirect experience of this momentary scene.

What is directly readable for the viewer is the dense series of marks made on the canvas, which, despite being at a remove from nature and the actual sensation of it, nevertheless ignites the inferential power of the spectator whose sensation becomes that of the inscription of sensation. While at a remove, the spectator’s perception is interlinked in a chain of sensation whose motive force is nature, Cézanne’s master.

Is Cézanne relating nature through the prism of nature or relating nature through the prism of sensation? In his work, the two are not easily detachable. Nature stimulates sensation and the sensing of nature is the prompt and inspiration of his choice, or rather compulsion, to paint nature and of his artistic choices while painting. Sensation is a term with an ambivalent status—it is what nature provokes in Cézanne and what he painstakingly produced on these late canvases. What nature stimulates in him is a heightened visuality but also a more holistic sense that includes tactility.

Cézanne wrote that the eye “becomes concentric through looking and working.” If not a conflation, there is in this idea a reciprocity between vision and the act of painting, which, for him, is a thinking act combining the senses and the intellect. There is not only a synthesis of the faculties in his purpose.

Until his death in 1906, he maintained that he had failed. There is an attempt by Cézanne to (as a metaphysician would characterize it) bridge the divide between the subjective and the objective, to bridge the gap between the human being and the external world. In this way, his late works display a desire, with sensation in a role of mediation, to bring together the human and the natural, that had been rigorously separated in philosophical and artistic discourse for centuries.

Increasingly in his late work, Cézanne went beyond both imitative mimesis of the world and abstraction from it. Rather, a compression of sensation and intellectual judgment is anchored in the “impression” as both a stimulus and the image of it. His struggle to transcend representation and achieve the presentation of his sensations and nature was, of course, an impossible one. It is in reference to this great aim that Cézanne thought he had failed. He was inevitably only on one side of the analogy, that of art. In his project to go beyond representation towards presentation, he could only ever approach that mirage without achieving it—not due to his insufficiency but to that of his medium. However, these late works are relics and records of his sensations which cater to both nature and his sensibility. In this fashion, he succeeded.